6
Emotion

Emotions play a powerful, central role in everyday life and, not surprisingly, they play an equally central role in military planning and training. Emotions shape how people perceive the world, they bias beliefs, and they influence our decisions and in large measure guide how people adapt their behavior to the physical and social environment.

Recent advances in psychology and neurophysiology have highlighted the rational and adaptive nature of our emotions (Lazarus, 1991; Damasio, 1994). It is clear that emotions can impair decisions, a fact exploited in a range of military tactics. Military planners throughout history have incorporated an emotional element into training and operations. Training exercises are often designed to elicit the strong emotions soldiers will feel on the battlefield and to create the shared emotions that lead to esprit de corps. And the more recent emphasis on “winning the peace” has placed a premium on soldiers who can understand and defuse the emotions of others. In terms of tactics, Machiavelli (1515) wrote that to motivate citizens to withstand a long siege one should encourage “fear of the cruelty of the enemy.” The more modern strategy of “shock and awe” relies just as explicitly on an appeal to emotion (Ullman and Wade, 1996). A 1994 U.S. Army leadership manual (U.S. Department of the Army, p. 8-1) illustrates the role of emotions in operational terms:

Commanders, while shielding their own troops from stress, should attempt to promote terror and disintegration in the opposing force…Some examples of stress-creating actions are attacks on his command structure; the use of artillery, air delivered weapons, smoke; deception; psychological

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OCR for page 55
6
Emotion
Emotions play a powerful, central role in everyday life and, not surpris-
ingly, they play an equally central role in military planning and training.
Emotions shape how people perceive the world, they bias beliefs, and they
influence our decisions and in large measure guide how people adapt their
behavior to the physical and social environment.
Recent advances in psychology and neurophysiology have highlighted
the rational and adaptive nature of our emotions (Lazarus, 1991; Damasio,
1994). It is clear that emotions can impair decisions, a fact exploited in
a range of military tactics. Military planners throughout history have in-
corporated an emotional element into training and operations. Training
exercises are often designed to elicit the strong emotions soldiers will feel
on the battlefield and to create the shared emotions that lead to esprit de
corps. And the more recent emphasis on “winning the peace” has placed a
premium on soldiers who can understand and defuse the emotions of oth-
ers. In terms of tactics, Machiavelli (1515) wrote that to motivate citizens
to withstand a long siege one should encourage “fear of the cruelty of the
enemy.” The more modern strategy of “shock and awe” relies just as ex-
plicitly on an appeal to emotion (Ullman and Wade, 1996). A 1994 U.S.
Army leadership manual (U.S. Department of the Army, p. 8-1) illustrates
the role of emotions in operational terms:
Commanders, while shielding their own troops from stress, should at-
tempt to promote terror and disintegration in the opposing force. . .Some
examples of stress-creating actions are attacks on his command structure;
the use of artillery, air delivered weapons, smoke; deception; psychological
55

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56 HUMAN BEHAVIOR IN MILITARY CONTEXTS
warfare; and the use of special operations forces. Such stress-creating ac-
tions can hasten the destruction of the enemy’s capability for combat.
The leadership manual also states ominously that “failure to consider the
human factors in an environment of increased lethality and uncertainty
could cause a nation’s concept of warfare to be irrelevant” (p. 1-9).
Despite this commonsense grasp of the importance of emotion, as a
topic of scientific investigation the study of emotion has waxed and waned.
In the past 20 years, however, behavioral scientists have firmly established
the importance of emotion in understanding such diverse individual behav-
iors as perception, attention, memory, and judgment and decision making
(Musch and Klauer, 2003), as well as such social behaviors as leadership,
persuasion, self-regulation, social intelligence, contagion, productivity, and
organizational effectiveness (Judge and Larsen, 2001). Indeed, there has
been a revolution in psychology and other behavioral and social sciences
(e.g., economics, neuroeconomics) in terms of viewing emotion as a criti-
cal variable in understanding a wide variety of human behaviors, many of
which have obvious relevance to military needs, even in the short term.
NATuRE OF EMOTIONS
Research on emotion is not without its controversies. As described by
Barrett (in this volume), a major debate concerns whether emotions are best
understood as discrete entities that have specific eliciting stimuli and distinct
signatures (e.g., facial expressions, physiology, action tendencies, etc.), or
whether they might be better conceptualized as broad dimensions, such as
valance and arousal. A researcher’s position in this debate influences how
emotion is conceived, measured, and investigated, and useful knowledge
has been generated from both sides of the debate.
Researchers agree that emotion represents a universal and intrinsic
aspect of human consciousness, which functions as an evaluative repre-
sentation of the environment to the person experiencing the emotion and
moderates important cognitive, behavioral, and physiological phenomena.
Just as the human retina transduces light waves into the experience of
color, the human mind transduces events in the environment into evaluative
experiences, i.e., emotions. Emotions are, at their core, internal represen-
tations of the affective evaluations one attaches to events in the external
environment.
Emotions, in turn, produce effects at every level of cognition and influ-
ence many social behaviors, and there are important individual differences
in those effects. Many of the main effects of emotion, and their individual
differences, could be important for the military and as topics of potentially
important and mission-relevant research. For example, the use of virtual re-

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EMOTION
ality methods for military training could be developed to include evocative
virtual training scenarios that are capable of inducing emotion, including
mixed emotions, in a manner similar to real-world military operations. This
is currently being attempted with computer simulations for the treatment
of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), but it remains to be validated in
the next few years.
Military operations often involve “in extremis” decision making and
action. Such operations can involve intense emotions including those as-
sociated with notice of deployment, reactions during training, anticipation
of operations, sometimes terrifying conditions during operations, and emo-
tions following return from operational theater (e.g., intense feelings of
euphoria, regret, grief, anger, or disgust). Over longer periods, the failure to
regulate emotional responses can lead to poor long-term performance (e.g.,
decision making) and health declines (e.g., PSTD), as well as disruptions to
social (e.g., family, unit) function.
It has been said that war is 5 percent anger, terror, and horror, inter-
spersed with long periods of waiting and boredom. The periods between
operations may grow longer when soldiers are used in peace support mis-
sions, in which soldiers who are trained for offensive and defensive opera-
tions must engage a high degree of prolonged self-restraint. Consequently,
how soldiers, and hence the military, cope with the emotional consequences
of boredom is also important. For example, how can soldiers maintain a
high level of alertness, attentiveness, and “situational awareness” during
these periods? How can military leaders prevent troop boredom from trans-
forming into aggression, despair, or hatred? How can soldiers be trained to
discern the ethical implications of their actions in a wide variety of situa-
tions, including the periods between operations?
COgNITION AND EMOTION
A person’s affective state is primarily influenced by a mostly automatic
process generically labeled evaluation (Bargh and Ferguson, 2000; Bar-
rett, 2006a; Blascovich, in press; Brendl and Higgins, 1995; Lazarus and
Folkman, 1984; Tesser and Martin, 1996). Evaluation is a fast and simple
form of analysis in which something is judged (often unconsciously) as
“good for me” or “bad for me” in a given situation, producing some change
in a person’s feelings and affect. People continually and automatically
evaluate situations and objects for their relevance and value (Bargh and Fer-
guson, 2000; but see Storbeck and Robinson, 2004): that is, whether or not
properties of the situation signify something important to one’s survival,
well-being, and goals (Ellsworth and Scherer, 2003), leading to changes in
affect. Evaluation can occur outside of awareness, can happen very rapidly,

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and can be independent of conscious control (for a recent review, see Moors
and De Houwer, 2006).
The brain’s cognitive architecture appears to have specialized modules
(at least metaphorically) for the fast and efficient processing of stimuli that
have evaluative consequences. For example, in perceptual search para-
digms, facial displays of fear and anger produce faster identification times
than do neutral faces (e.g., Pernilla, Lundqvist, Karlsson, and Ohman,
2005). Studies using the dot-probe paradigm (a laboratory technique for
tracking attention) also find an attentional bias toward angry faces (e.g.,
Cooper and Langton, 2006).
Other threatening stimuli, such as spiders and snakes, also produce
such perceptual and attentional biases (Barrett, in this volume). Mapping
out the boundary conditions for such effects, along with individual differ-
ences and emotional specificity, is relevant for many military situations.
For example, can soldiers be trained to use and rely on the fast perceptual
processing that occurs with threatening stimuli? How can they best mini-
mize false alarms—the perception of threat when threat does not exist? Can
surveillance systems be engineered that produce the same perceptual supe-
riority for threat detection?
Once initiated, the effects of evaluation and subsequent affective states
on other cognitive processes are immediate and relatively diffuse in the cog-
nitive system. For example, affective states not only influence how people
interpret what they see, but literally what they see (Duncan and Barrett,
in press). Affect can modulate processing in the visual ventral stream (the
brain’s object perception system) even as far back as V1, a visual area in
the cortex (Stolarova, Keil, and Moratti, 2006).
People use their affective reactions as additional sources of informa-
tion to make judgments, especially in uncertain conditions, in both explicit
(Schwarz and Clore, 1983) and implicit ways (Bechara, Damasio, et al.,
1994; Bechara, Tranel, Damasio, and Damasio, 1996, but see Dunn, Dal-
gleish, and Lawrence, 2006). In some instances, people misattribute their
affective reactions (Payne, Cheng, Govorun, and Stewart, 2005) or give a
“false alarm,” and see a threat where none is present (Quigley and Barrett,
1999), sometimes with dire consequences (e.g., shooting a suspect who
actually poses no threat). More research on emotion will lead to better un-
derstanding of when affect helps, and when it hinders, the accurate percep-
tion of threat and reward. Military situations are fraught with uncertainty,
and understanding the role of emotion in arriving at accurate situational
awareness may prove useful in optimizing decision processes.
Emotion has effects at all levels of cognitive processing; many of them
are directly relevant to military contexts. For example, mild emotion some-
times facilitates memory (e.g., better recall for items associated with affect),

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EMOTION
but stronger emotions (intense fear) sometimes produce amnesia for events
right before and after the eliciting event. Emotions can influence perceptual
activity: for example, fearful faces enhance contrast sensitivity for visual
information (Gasper and Clore, 2002). Emotions can also affect judgment:
for example, induced sadness influences judgments of the steepness of a hill
(Storbeck and Clore, 2005). Thus, emotions may influence soldiers’ assess-
ments of their own ability to undertake and complete missions.
Affective context can also influence behaviors: people exhibit more
anger and outrage in a disgusting environment than in a benign one (Clore,
Gasper, and Garvin, 2001). Affective heuristics also influence judgment
and decision making. New research in a field called affective forecasting
(Kermer, Driver-Linn, Wilson, and Gilbert, 2006) reveals that people of-
ten make decisions on the basis of anticipated future affect, even though
such anticipations are often incorrect. Other research (e.g., Wilson, Lisle,
Schooler, and Hodges, 1993) suggests that introspection about one’s rea-
sons for making a decision can reduce satisfaction with the choice. Such
findings are likely to have implications for how the military makes some
types of decisions and how it conducts postmission reviews.
Emotion can also have important effects on decision making. For
example, Loewenstein, Read, and Baumeister (2003) have shown that
discounting rates (the tendency to see near-term consequences, both costs
and benefits, as worth more than identical consequences further out in the
future) are steeper when the consequences have emotional connotations.
Moreover, decision strategies can change toward compensatory models (i.e.,
careful weighting and balancing) when people have to make difficult nega-
tive emotional tradeoffs (Luce, Bettman, and Payne, 1997). Emotion can
influence judgments directly: for example, one study showed that watching
a murder movie influenced subjects’ later judgments for punishment of
perpetrators of unrelated crimes (Lerner and Goldberg, 1999). A related
military application concerns postconflict behavior and understanding, such
as how soldiers react to and treat captured enemy combatants and local
civilians. Understanding how emotions influence moral decision making
should be of interest because of the inevitability of intense emotions in
these situations. Anticipated regret can also influence decision making: one
study found that people reverse their preferences when they are told they
will get the feedback necessary to know whether they should or should not
regret the decision (Connolly and Zoolenberg, 2002). Research has also
shown that emotions can also bring about self-deception (e.g., Mele, 2000)
or overwhelm reason (Shiv and Fedorikhin, 1999) in making decisions.
Because of the importance of decisions in military operations, research on
the nature of emotional effects on decision making is of crucial importance
to the U.S. military; this is a research agenda for the long term.

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EMOTION AND SELF-REguLATION
The self-regulation of mood and emotion is an important topic in the
study of emotion. Currently, some researchers are focusing on a few strate-
gies for self-regulation, such as suppression and reappraisal (Gross and
John, 2003); others are focusing on a wider taxonomy of strategies and
behaviors that may be effective at remediating stress and negative emotions
(e.g., Larsen and Prizmic, 2005). Key topics for research in the field—which
are relevant to the military—include the relative efficacy of different emo-
tion regulation strategies, the degree to which such strategies can be taught
and learned, whether some strategies work better in regulating one emo-
tion than another, and whether some individuals are better than others in
regulating their emotions. This last topic is, of course, central to the concept
of emotional intelligence, which is already of interest to the U.S. military.1
The concept of emotional intelligence is hotly debated among researchers,
and the military has many reasons to be interested in the resolution of this
debate. If it is a viable concept, emotional intelligence could be relevant to
many military problems, including: prevention and detection of PTSD and
the timely return to combat duty, the selection of military recruits for spe-
cific roles on the basis of their levels of emotional intelligence, the training
of soldiers to recognize emotions in themselves and others and to cope with
extreme emotions, the training of leaders to manage emotions in themselves
and their subordinates, and the design of training environments to simulate
realistic scenarios that require emotionally adaptive skills.
EMOTION AND SOCIAL BEHAvIOR
A wide variety of social behaviors is influenced by affect. For ex-
ample, the effectiveness of persuasion can be influenced by the emotional
terms in which the persuasive appeal is presented: that is, what a person
has to gain (positive frame) versus what the person has to lose (negative
frame). Persuasion is important to the military in a number of settings,
ranging from enlistment and retention to negotiation and communication
with enemy combatants and civilians in the field. In addition, this line of
research should also be of considerable value for psychological opera-
tions—situations in which the military attempts to influence or persuade
civilians or combatants through alternatives to force (e.g., communications
or propaganda).
Another important topic is the role of emotion in prejudice and stereo-
typing, both within the U.S. military and between U.S. military or civilian
1 For example there was a workshop on emotional intelligence held in November 2003 by the
Educational Testing Service and the U.S. Army Research Institute; see also Bar-On, Handley,
and Fund (2005).

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EMOTION
personnel and opposing forces in the field or enemy combatants under
U.S. control. What are the behavioral, cultural, and sociological processes
that contribute to dehumanizing effects, such as those observed at the Abu
Ghraib prison? Can people be trained to resist such effects? What role does
a long period of vigilance or boredom play in making soldiers susceptible
to such effects or other negative consequences?
Another area of developing research concerns emotions in work set-
tings (e.g., Weiss and Cropanzano, 1996). Several questions are relevant for
military settings: What are the display rules for emotions in various military
work settings? What are the effects of emotions on work performance or
on attitudes toward work and the organization? What are the effects of
dispositional influences, such as temperament and personality, on the likeli-
hood of experiencing specific affective states (see, e.g., Fritz and Sonnentag,
2006)? What opportunities in the military workplace exist for the effec-
tive remediation of negative emotions? For example, when troops interact
closely with local populations, as they do during low-intensity warfare,
there are inevitably cases in which troops suffer casualties due to “betrayal”
by someone in that population. Such events can give rise to extremely nega-
tive attitudes and prejudices regarding the entire local population and lead
to unwarranted actions against innocent indigents, which, in turn, disrupts
attempts to build rapport with the population. This situation poses a very
serious challenge for small unit leaders, especially when troops are exposed
to low-level combat for an extended period of time.
Sophisticated methods for measuring affect (as well as cognition and
performance) in naturalistic settings are now available, such as computer-
ized palm-like devices that administer experience-sampling protocols (Beal
and Weiss, 2003). Such devices could facilitate the study of emotional pro-
cesses in real time in military settings, especially when coupled with on-line
ambulatory assessment of physiological processes (see Chapter 7).
In work settings, an important question concerns the carryover of af-
fective events from one setting (e.g., home) to another (e.g., work) and vice
versa (Demerouti, Bakker, and Bulters, 2004; Illies et al., 2006; Sonnentag,
2003; Sonnentag and Zijlstra, 2006). The quality of a soldier’s personal
life (marriage, social network, community) influences important work and
performance behaviors, and work outcomes influence personal life as well.
Emotional carryover between the battlefield and R&R (rest and relaxation),
as well as from one mission (combat) to another (peace keeping), represent
important areas for investigation.
EMOTION AND LEADERSHIP
Emotion plays a role in several important aspects of leadership. One
phenomenon, known as emotional contagion, refers to the spreading of an

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affective state from person to person in a group, such as a military unit.
These effects may be negative, such as when the affect contagion concerns
a disorganizing emotion such as extreme fear, or they may be positive, such
as the spreading belief in a group’s capability to succeed at some task. The
latter contagion is known as “collective efficacy” (Bandura, 1990), which is
defined as a unit’s shared perception that the group is able to succeed at a
given task. This phenomenon is being investigated in various athletic teams
(Bandura, 1997; Feltz and Lirgg, 1998; Heuzé, Raimbault, and Fontayne,
2006), and it might be generalizable to military units with defined goals
and standards for success. An important research question for the military
is how a team leader might promote collective efficacy and how he or she
might inhibit the effects of contagion of negative emotion.
Another leadership question concerns a component of emotional intel-
ligence that relates to the perception of emotion in others and the ability to
regulate emotion and motivation in others (Bar-On, 2004). This aspect of
emotional intelligence has been understudied relative to the self-regulation
of emotion, and it has important implications for leadership effectiveness in
military settings (Druskat, Sala, and Mount, 2005). Measures of this aspect
of emotional intelligence could be investigated with reference to important
leadership criteria and, if predictive, might be very useful for selection
purposes in the military. A related topic is leadership paranoia, in which
leaders who are isolated may develop beliefs about their subordinates that
are inaccurate.
EMOTION AND CuLTuRE
The topic of emotion and culture defines a large and growing research
literature that holds important insights for the military. One aspect of this
topic concerns how emotions are communicated from person to person
and how this communication is affected when the participants are from
different cultures. As one example, the Japanese culture encourages socially
engaging emotions (e.g., friendly feelings, guilt), and North American cul-
ture fosters socially disengaging emotions (e.g., pride, anger) (Kitayama,
Mesquita, and Karasawa, 2006). Japanese people show a tendency to expe-
rience engaging emotions more strongly than disengaging emotions, while
Americans are prone to the opposite tendency. For traditional Japanese
people, subjective well-being is more closely associated with the experience
of positive engaging emotions (friendliness), while in North America sub-
jective well-being is more closely associated with the experience of positive
disengaging emotions (pride). Such cultural differences in the experience
of and comfort with various emotional states are very important in such
areas as negotiation, training, and persuasion, which are important issues
for the U.S. military. In general, cultures differ in the importance attached

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EMOTION
to certain goals, which can lead in turn to different emotional reactions to
the same event (Mesquita, 2001; Parkinson, Fischer, and Manstead, 2005).
As the military increasingly trains and conducts missions with forces from
different cultures, detailed knowledge of those cultural differences, in par-
ticular the emotional aspects of those cultures, will be important to mission
success. For example, what gestures do people from a particular culture
find threatening? What gestures signify respect? Are there culture-specific
triggers of aggression? When negotiating with people from a given culture,
do they have certain goals that differ from ours? Are there culture-specific
ways of motivating people? Are there culture-specific ways of eliciting co-
operation? It will take many years for scientists to determine the answers
to these questions.